Gibson stepped back. His face glistened with embarrassment. “Sure,” he said, “your Pa’s right. You better not tell him about this. I wasn’t thinking.” He was scared of Butch Hogan.
Myra moved on. “I won’t tell him,” she said.
He watched her hungrily as she went, her buttocks jerking under the tight dress.
It was quite a walk to her home, and she was glad when she pushed open the low wooden gate that led to the tumbledown shack.
She stood at the gate and looked at the place. She thought, “I hate it! I hate it! I hate it!”
The garden was a patch of baked, cracked mud. The house was a one-storeyed affair, made throughout with wood that wind and rain had warped and sun had bleached. It stood there—an ugly depressing symbol of poverty.
She walked up the path and climbed the two high steps leading to the verandah. In the shadow, away from the sun, Butch Hogan sat, his great hands resting on the top of a heavy stick.
He said, “I’ve been waiting for you.”
She stood there and looked at him. His broken, tortured face, those two horrible eyes, sightless, with a yellow blob in each pupil, looking like two clots of phlegm, the great square head, the overhanging brows, and the ferocious mouth made her shiver. He startled her by suddenly regurgitating violently into the mud patch a sodden wad of chewing-tobacco.
He said, “Say somethin’, can’t you? Where in hell’ve you been?”